


Firefly in a Jar

by A_Song_to_Say_Goodbye



Category: Assassination Classroom
Genre: Future Fic, M/M, melancholic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-21
Updated: 2018-12-21
Packaged: 2019-09-24 05:26:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,266
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17094722
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/A_Song_to_Say_Goodbye/pseuds/A_Song_to_Say_Goodbye
Summary: Growing up is not always for the better. But it’s not up to you to decide that.





	Firefly in a Jar

**Author's Note:**

> Originally posted on Tumblr. You can view the first draft [ here](https://land-under-wave.tumblr.com/post/160718310377/hotaru) and a partial explanation of it [ here](https://land-under-wave.tumblr.com/post/160791418027/is-there-any-sort-of-happy-ending-for-hotaru)

Karma didn’t recognize him when he first saw him. That was the first sign of how much Asano Gakushū had changed.

This time, Asano Gakushū had hair neatly parted to the sides and a crisp dark suit, perfectly pressed, like a magazine businessman. He sat at his father’s desk with hands clasped and fingers laced together. He looked like the chairman, Karma realized with a sort of slow horror, the same way you woke up from a dream.

Karma didn’t know why this was so unexpected to him. It had been nearly a decade since they’d seen each other last, after all, and it wasn’t like time had passed for Karma but not him. Still, some small part of him had expected Asano feel the same spark of impetus and rivalry as he had in their school days. Some small part of him had expected high school to be forever.

It’d been a pretty stupid thought. If that were the case, the former members of Class A wouldn’t have asked him to intervene.  _You’re the only one who might be able to bring him back_ , Sakakibara Ren had said over coffee. His tone had been smooth enough, but with the flicker in his eyes and the faint twist in his lip, Karma hadn’t been able to help wondering what it had cost him to admit that. To admit Asano had gone off to a place where his friends could not reach him.

“Ne, ne, Asano-kun, long time no see,” Karma said lightly, trying to feel him out and see how deeply those changes stretched. “Still going to therapy for your daddy issues?”

“Akabane,” he responded, wearing a glacially pleasant smile, without the slightest hint of the seething anger that the sight of Karma used to inspire. No snipe about the carton of strawberry milk in his hand. Instead, he lifted his chin in a way Karma was almost surprised to find he could still read as cool distaste. “What a surprise to see you here. I knew someone from the Ministry of Economics would be coming by, but I did not know it would be you.”

Karma flashed him one of his trademark smirks. “Gotta keep you on your toes! But you know, you haven’t answered my question,” he goaded. For the first time in a few years, he had to put in some actual effort not to let his mild panic slip through his carefree mask. “You are, aren’t you? Don’t worry, Class E stopped making fun of you for that three years ago. Now we just make fun of your midterm scores and how gullible Class A was.”

He was expected, no, he was praying for some kind of sarcastic retort about how juvenile they were for harping on decade-old events. But Asano, standing up to move towards the window, merely adopted a slightly different smile that didn’t come close to reaching his eyes. “Ah, yes, we were such children in our middle school days. Perhaps we should reminisce together sometime,” he said. His voice was all Asano Gakuhō.

Karma nearly started to laugh in disbelief, at the sheer ridiculousness of this situation. What did you think would happen? he asked himself. It wasn’t like he’d have come across Asano in his old high school uniform. And some maturing was perfectly normal — look at him, the gainfully employed bureaucrat who didn’t even make Nagisa cry more than once or twice a year. He couldn’t have expected Asano to remain the same.

But this. This was all wrong. Karma wanted to scream, or to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until something like the boy he used to be fell out of the smiling stranger.  _Who broke you?_  was bursting at the seams of his mouth.  _Was it your father and the weight of his expectations? Or did you break yourself?_

“Alright, Asano-kun, I’ll level with you,” he sang. “The truth is, all your old friends are getting worried about you, so they sent me to check up on you. Wasn’t that sweet of them? You Class A people are so adorable.”

“I thought it might have been something along those lines. The timing did not escape me,” Gakushu allowed. He looked back from the window, and the steel in his eyes was the closest thing yet to his old fire, in the wrongest of ways. “Let me make this clear: You cannot change me. I am not something to be fixed, nor do I need to be. If you would desist from imposing your ideas of who I should be upon me, I would appreciate it.”

“Aw, but Asano-kun, it’s not really me. The people who know you best just lowered themselves to asking me for help!” He kept his voice light and singsong so he didn’t let any desperation leak through. “It’s not like I’m worried, but all your classmates are, you know. What a mean person to waste your friends’ sacrifice of their dignity!”

“Middle school friends,” Asano corrected. It was almost physically painful to hear the absence of triumph or any glint of smug superiority at having spotted an opening. “People grow up, Akabane. Friendship is not eternal. I would think that you, of all people, would understand the falseness of those platitudes.”

Karma, for once, was at a loss for words. It wasn’t even because Asano had landed a particularly harsh blow. It was just the sheer dissonance of the situation and how incompatible it felt with reality.  

“I hope you will enjoy this visit to your alma mater. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a meeting,” said the man who was once more than an extension of Asano Gakuhō. He walked away without waiting for a response, and what had it come to that this was the sassiest thing he’d done in the entirety of their conversation?

Things couldn’t just end like this. Karma started to reach for him in protest, words already forming on his lips, but then he caught himself. This marble-carved Asano was not someone Karma could allow to know his secrets, things like he’d enjoyed their rivalry and even sort of missed him since they graduated. This Asano was not someone Karma could let beneath his laughing indifference, because this Asano was not the one who had always brought out the deepest parts of Karma, the sharpness, the brilliance, the strength and his convictions.

Karma hadn’t let many people see those sides of him because no one liked the ugliness beneath the child prodigy. They wanted to hold him up as a beacon to admire, not a disillusioned, cruel, slightly sociopathic ex-delinquent. But those things had never made Asano falter. Instead, he’d always came back for more.

It had felt something like acceptance.

Karma hadn’t realized how much he’d missed that until the moment where he was standing there with his hand half-lifted, staring at Asano’s retreating back and the ruins of an almost-relationship.

 _But,_  a voice whispered, _who is the one who ruined it?_

He slumped back against that fancy, immaculate desk and gave into his desire to laugh, only now he was laughing at himself as the realization dawned that the very premise of their conversation was fallacious. It wasn’t Asano who was wrong. It was Karma and Class A who were wrong for trying to make him revert to his old self. You couldn’t just cage people up and put them in a jar of your expectations, no matter how bright they shone. That was how you killed them.

Still. It made the top of the world so lonely.

**Author's Note:**

> I actually like this fic a lot. It's one of my favorite things I've written in the past few years.


End file.
